Burton: 13 Movie Review

I worked in a snowboard shop for seven years of my life. Working in a shop has its fun moments, but there’s also a lot of shit involved that can really suck about it. One of those things was watching snowboard videos. I know what you are thinking, that doesn’t sound bad at all. When you are stuck in the realms of retail oblivion and the same snowboard movie is playing over and over and over and over and over and over again, the images and soundtrack are akin to Chinese water torture. So, I literally haven’t watched a snow-bro video for about five years. That is, until I got my hands on a copy of Burton’s release for this season, simply called 13. As I cracked a Natural Light and pulled some tubes on my couch to watch this DVD in Hi-Def on my kind-of-new widescreen, I realized that if you only have to watch a snowboard video once, and if that video is really good, then you will actually like it! How relieving!

Burton as a brand has always been notoriously easy to hate because of their dominance over the industry. But there is a reason they are what they are. Burton does things right or they don’t do it at all, whether you are talking about their products or how they put their teams together— and this video is by far no exception. I won’t waste my word count or your time by giving you a ton of highlights because the whole video is solid.

As I get older and drift into “weird old guy at the house party” status, I can say I was personally inspired to see that Jeremy Jones and Terje Haakonsen are still really fucking good. Jake Burton needs to tell us all where he’s hiding the fountain of youth that he’s feeding his team. I’m guessing it’s in some sacred grove in Vermont somewhere.

The only thing I can think of that would have made the video better is if Burton could have somehow gotten footage of Shawn White trashing the hotel and getting beat up by the cops last month. Finally, the Flying Tomato did something that legitimizes him as a real snowboarder, in my eyes. I’m going to change his nickname to the Flying Bloody Mary. Check out the video of Salt Lake's 13 premiere at the Gateway Megaplex: